Application programs, such as game applications, presentation applications, e-reader applications, computer-aided design applications, and editing applications, are generating increasingly complex and sophisticated content to be presented on a display of a computing device. For example, a game application may generate content showing movement of a firefighter through a burning building. A presentation application may generate content showing the unrolling of a scroll that contains a complex document with text and graphics in one portion of the display and the waving of a flag in another portion of the display. An e-reader application may generate content showing pages of a document with special effects such as animating the flipping of a page or many pages in rapid succession and displaying non-sequential pages of the document simultaneously in different display area. A computer-aided design application may generate content that animates movement of the internals of a complex machine, such as a car engine or a mechanical watch. An editing application may generate content that applies special effects to the editing process such as showing a deleted page spiraling into a trash can or animating the movement of an image from its current location in the document to a new location.
The presenting of such complex and sophisticated content can require considerable amount of computational resources. As a result, many low computational power devices such as e-readers and smartphones cannot present such content. The more complex content might only be effectively presented on displays of high-end workstations with significant computational power. Even with such significant computational power, it may not be possible to display complex content on a very large display such as the size of a wall or billboard with tens of millions of pixels. It would be desirable to have more efficient techniques for presenting such content.